In many emergency events or other types of disruptive circumstances, it is difficult to determine the spatiotemporal impact of the event, in other words, the impact of the event across a geographic area over time. It is often difficult to precisely determine the level of impact of temporally and spatially localized events, such as natural and human-instigated disasters, epidemics, protests, riots, and terrorist attacks, on various regions and on various populations. For example, during and after a natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, government agencies and relief groups manually collected data on the social and economic impact of the event by sending agents to the various locations to assess the situation. However, detailed information about the impact of the event was not available until months or even years after Hurricane Sandy ended, due to the difficulty of compiling, reconciling, and interpreting the collected data. This long delay can cause problems in determining the efficient allocation of resources to communities that need support.
Social media, such as the Twitter® platform, is often used during natural disasters and states of emergency to gauge public response and to disseminate information regarding the event in real-time. Some comparative methods measure the social and economic impact of events by analyzing posts by users of social media services such as Twitter® and Facebook®. However, these comparative methods typically do not estimate the causal effect of a targeted “treatment” or event.